Lead Us Into Temptation

Watching Padma Lakshmi as she prepares to go before a camera lens is like observing the composition of a signature dish at a fine restaurant. Many hands are involved, each one assigned to an unthinkably small task of extreme precision. Instead of painting plates with delicate reductions and positioning microgreens atop towers of protein, they're painting the contours of her back with just the right shade of cinnamon brown and positioning her thick, black hair in waves that make it look like a dark, bottomless sea. When the camera starts clicking, no fewer than 13 people have contributed to dressing and coiffing and making up this multifaceted entrée, this model/actress/culinary diva.

I'm standing innocently and uselessly aside, watching this all go down in a photo studio in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Then Padma cocks her head over her shoulder and casts a deep, sultry stare that stabs me in the chest like a 10-inch chef's knife. Her eyes soften and her lips curl into a sly smile: "If only I had this many fluffers in the kitchen. I'd have them poof up my salads."

If Padma's really looking for help tousling her arugula, I'm sure I could work something out. After all, she may be one of the greatest catches of the new millennium. Padma speaks five languages and has lived and worked in more countries than most people can pick out on a map. She has an award-winning cookbook and one of the most popular cooking shows on cable (Top Chef), and her ex-husband is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. She is 15 IQ points smarter than the average human and three heart palpitations more beautiful than the average supermodel, with soft, cappuccino skin, deep, burrowing eyes, and more pleasing curves and stunning vistas than the Pacific Coast Highway.

But the one thing Padma doesn't have, something she's never had, is a man who treats her right in the kitchen. "Guys don't cook for me," she'll tell you, with the dejected look of a little girl who just lost her puppy to a fur trader. "I don't know why that is." Maybe it's her well-documented prowess with a spatula and a spice cabinet, or the fact that as executioner on Top Chef, she makes a living castrating very capable cooks with her trademark death blow: "Please pack your knives and go."

No matter. What's important is that in her search for a man who'll cook for her, Padma has offered hope to every man who has ever dreamed of dating out of his league. The way to this woman's heart -- maybe any woman's heart -- is through the sensual red zone known as the kitchen.

So now I have a mission, which I undertake for the benefit of mankind: to find out what to feed an exotic creature like Padma. It's a quest worth pursuing on behalf of a woman who has spent most of her life adrift, driven in equal measure by wanderlust and food lust. To chart the evolution of both, I'll present her in banquet form: Padma, a lifetime in four courses. I think your appetite will increase with each one.

First Course: Stinky Curry and a Liter of Milk

Born in India and transplanted to New York with her mom by the age of 4, Padma spent her earliest years divided between the solitude of a single-parent apartment in Manhattan and the buzz of an overstuffed household in the city of Chennai (formerly Madras), where a dozen family members were in residence at any given time.

"All of the action of the house was in the kitchen," she notes. "All the decisions were made there, all the family secrets revealed." It was in that kitchen, where sights and sounds of cooking seasoned every major event, that Padma fell in love with food. Her new cookbook, Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet, largely reflects those early, heady times spent in the kitchen -- from cauliflower roasted with a pinch of anise seed to crusty pita chips dusted with sumac powder.

"You can have very simple food with those light, subtle brushstrokes of flavor," she says, recalling her childhood, "and your cooking can have a delicacy and a very sophisticated quality without being fussy."

But when she shuttled back to New York, the smells and tastes of her motherland didn't win her any friends. In American classrooms, Padma was that exotic girl with the weird lunches.

"Being from India wasn't that cool when I was young," she recalls. "My classmates would show up with these very neat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off and I would show up with this very pungent curry, and they'd be, like, 'Ewww, that's gross!' Kids are cruel."

As if curry isn't hard enough for American kids to comprehend, Padma was also from a strict vegetarian household. She didn't have her first bite of meat until seventh grade.

"My mom would make me drink four 8-ounce glasses of milk a day for protein," she says. "To this day, one of my favorite things is an ice cold glass of milk at midnight."

Go to the next page for three more courses of Padma...

Second Course: Cream of Alphabet Soup

"By the time I was 9, I was handling a knife in the kitchen," she says matter-of-factly, as if most kids are julienning in fourth grade. "My mom was working and going to school for her masters, so I became her sous chef."

Padma and her mother moved west when she was a teenager, landing near Los Angeles. It was there, influenced by the Latin flavors pervading L.A., that she developed what she calls her "MacGyver cooking style."

"I'd sometimes come home from school and make bean-and-cheese enchiladas and put them in the oven and have a hot meal for my mom when she came home from work. It was me and my mom against the world. She worked hard for everything I had."

Padma matched that work ethic in the kitchen. "I started by gussying up cans of soup. I would mix cream of potato soup with alphabet soup, a can of each, and add diced jalapeños to it. And I would chop up some fresh parsley. If it wasn't for the alphabet letters, people would think it was homemade."

Perhaps because of those humble beginnings -- with a can of Campbell's finest in one hand, a spoon in the other -- Padma doesn't take herself too seriously, especially in the kitchen. "My style is mostly spontaneous. You just have to wing it, man. You cook with your mouth, tasting as you go. It doesn't take a genius."

Third Course: Beef in Red Wine and Whiskey con Coca-Cola

Padma fled to Spain the last semester of her senior year of college to escape a gripping case of boredom.

"I really discovered the whole sensuality of life when I was in Europe," she says. "Madrid was exciting in '92. They were still partying from the death of Franco. I was taking my textbooks to dinner because I knew we'd end up dancing at a disco and then at the after-hours clubs. By 5 we'd go for churros con chocolate, and by then it was time to go to school. We'd show up reeking of cigarettes and whiskey con Coca-Cola."

Her modeling career began with an encounter in a Madrid café and burgeoned over meetings in tapas bars across the city, where she fell hard for simple, classic Spanish dishes like tortilla española, an egg-and-potato omelet that Padma has been known to pack for picnics with men. But she would love it if some man would reciprocate.

Padma eventually migrated across Europe, settling in for a 6-year stint in Milan, where her modeling career exploded. She met a man in Milan, got engaged, and moved in. In her mother-in-law-to-be's kitchen, she learned the exacting rules of traditional Italian cooking. "I learned how to make polenta, ragu Bolognese, white ragu, fish carpaccio…so many things." Her favorite? Brasato al Barolo, a lusty braise of bacon-wrapped beef brisket and hearty red wine.

The bacon is Padma's twist. "It's my one true love." I doubt she means that literally, but given the way she intones the declaration, I can't be sure.

Fourth Course: Scotch and Scrambled Eggs

The innocent days in Europe eventually came to an end. When she left Italy, she was alone. "I was really young, and I needed a clean break."

Things happened fast for Padma back in the United States. She published her first book, Easy Exotic, which won Best First Book at the Versailles World Cookbook Fair in 1999. She hosted a Food Network series called, fittingly enough, Melting Pot: Padma's Passport. She played a princess in The 10 Commandments, an alien princess on Star Trek: Enterprise, and a disco girl alongside Mariah Carey in the ill-fated Glitter.

It was in these high-flying times that she met her husband-to-be, the Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie. The "beauty and the brain" story that emerged was too perfect for the paparazzi to ignore: A man whose prowess with a pen is so absolute and penetrating that it inspires a death sentence from the then – supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, meets a woman whose looks are so stunning as to melt the heart of the cruelest dictator. The tabloids feasted. Lady Lakshmi dinner parties became events of lore, with guests from the art, entertainment, and food world gathering around her exotic creations: Moroccan curried chicken pie, baked figs, rose-petal-and-pistachio ice cream.

In 2006, the producers of a new cable show that pitted aspiring chefs against each other decided to replace the hot wife of a famous entertainer (Billy Joel) with the hot wife of a famous writer, and Padma moved in as the new host of Top Chef. More than modeling, more than acting, even more than being married to Rushdie, Top Chef made Padma into a person you probably recognize on these pages. And the credit is all hers: It's her balance of beauty, brains, and culinary savvy that has made her such an enduring and enjoyable part of the show.

"Padma has impeccable taste," says Eric Ripert, a chef, co-owner of Le Bernardin, guest judge on Top Chef, and the food columnist for this magazine. "And she's a very good cook." What did she serve Ripert (who has since purchased her book for all his line cooks)? "Fish with coconut milk, Indian rice, and an amazing ice cream."

That she cooked fish for Ripert, a man many consider to be the world's foremost master of seafood, speaks volumes about Padma's searing-hot level of confidence. Whether soldiering through a 6-hour photo shoot with 13 fluffers, pinballing around the planet as a global ambassador for the Keep a Child Alive AIDS campaign, or battling it out with the other Top Chef judges until 4 a.m. on which cook they should fillet, Padma doesn't back down from anything.

Most notably, she doesn't back down from a second helping. Of anything.

I called up a few of her closest friends to plumb the depths of her appetite.

"Astonishing," is how one describes it.

"I'm constantly impressed by how much she can eat," says another.

"Her appetite is amazing," says chef Tom Colicchio, the owner of Craft and Top Chef's head judge. "I keep telling her that one day her metabolism will slow down."

My mind was spinning with possibilities.

What's her response to all the claims levied about her appetite? "I can take down half a pizza, a bottle of wine, and a tiramisu without blinking an eye. But if I do that, then the next day I'm eating fish and sautéed vegetables. It's all about balance."

What does she like to drink? "Single-malt scotch. At any point in a meal, scotch."

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